This course examines the relationship between the emerging modern world system and changes in technology, environment, and medicine, with particular emphasis on European overseas expansion and its impact in non-Western regions. This semester, we will focus specifically on the intimate links of knowledge and power in the history of the Americas. Through the analysis of the circulation of commodities—e.g. chocolate, silver, and guano—we will inquire into the labor and technologies that built the Atlantic world, as well as their dire costs. We will ask whose knowledge made science and medicine as we know them through historians’ treatment of objects such as maps, specimens, and materia medica.
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- Precolonial
- Conquest/Early Colonial
- Late colonial/Independence Era
- Nineteenth Century